 | RACING HISTORY |
YEAR: 2001
FEATURE RACE COMMENT
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| Vicki Purdon with Young Rufus after the FFA |
Young Rufus earned a ticket to contest the Miracle Mile in Sydney, but he won't be going. Harness Racing's latest budding star was officially issued with an invitation to the event after his sensational victory in the $100,000 Air New Zealand Free-For-All at Addington on Show Day. But trainer Mark Purdon says at this stage of the pacer's season it was not in his best interests to trek across the Tasman, where four of his six owners live. "He's done a big job this week, winning those two races," Purdon said. "And if we went over there we'd have to keep him up, plus there's all the travelling with a float trip to Auckland and a flight to Sydney. I just thought we are doing the best by the horse to decline to offer."
Young Rufus's elevation to centre stage this season has been sudden but not totally unexpected, although his trainer/driver is slightly surprised. "He has always been a nice horse, but I never expected him to rise to this level so soon," Purdon continued. "The night he finished sixth first-up at Alexandra Park he was supposed to be in a 4-year-old race that never got of the ground, so he ended up racing against his own class and they went 2:42.5 (2200 metres), home in 55. He probably wasn't ready for that. But after he came back from Auckland he went super one day at the trials, beating a couple of nice horses including Kym's Girl, and I thought then that he may have just turned the corner."
To Ashburton on Labour Weekend and Young Rufus scored impressively there, so impressively in fact that Purdon thought he could have almost won the Flying Stakes earlier that afternoon had he got the run that stablemate Bogan Fella did in the event. Purdon kept his feet firmly on the ground though, and come the minor Free-For-All on Cup Day he had some reservations very late in the piece. "When we were walking around at the start I looked at the other horses in the race and thought 'gee, I hope I'm not being too tough on him here'. But he put up a huge preformance that day, and it looked even better when I watched the replay of the race later that night. You just don't see horses do what he did."
Nominated for Show Day's Air New Zealand FFA just so Purdon had the option up his sleeve, Young Rufus showed no ill-effects from his tough Cup Day outing so he started him in it. And what the young pretender did to his older more experienced rivals was simply outstanding.
Having just his 19th raceday appearance, Young Rufus eventually got to the lead, ran them along, and still kept enough gas in the tank to kick with the best of them in the home straight. "In front was the place I wanted to be," Purdon confirmed afterwards. "Kym's Girl was the horse to beat, because the Cup winner generally is in the Free-For-All, and you can count on Colin (De Filippi) to be timing his run to perfection. I looked round turning for home because I thought 'she'll be turning up here very shortly'. But when you run your last quarter in 27.7 in front and on the fence like he did, it makes it hard for the rest,"Purdon said.
Credit: John Robinson writing in NZHR Weekly